Maybe the first high-speed rail service should be a shuttle across the floor of the Alberta legislature.

They do go back and forth, these MLAs. And the latest move — Wildrose MLAs Kerry Towle and Ian Donovan jumping to the Progressive Conservatives — comes with a mighty blast of the high-speed horn.

These MLAs represent a big chunk of the Wildrose rural heartland. With their departure, and the resignation of Joe Anglin to sit as an independent, Wildrose is seriously threatened just where it has been most popular.

The party not only dropped four byelections to the government last month, but has now lost three MLAs, mostly as a result of those defeats.

Smith’s party appears to be passing the PCs again — but this time, on the way down.

Towle and Donovan were solid MLAs, among the most able in the Wildrose crew.

Donovan is a straight-up fellow with a good mind who was always well liked by many PCs.

Towle was a fierce critic of the Tories who inflicted severe damage with revelations of sub-standard seniors care. Her most public victory was disclosing the policy of one shower a week inside seniors homes, and then shaming the PCs into allowing two.

TheMLA for Innisfail-Sylvan Lake has never been very ideological. She ran for Wildrose partly because of unhappiness with inadequate help for her late brother Ron, who went into care after being diagnosed with Huntington’s disease in 2008.

She’s leaving Wildrose now, Towle says, because many of her constituents like Premier Jim Prentice and his leadership.

Prentice is adept at refusing to gloat in public, but it must have been tempting on Monday.

Smith, meanwhile, gamely began question period by probing government ethics, as if nothing had happened. It was a brave performance, although unconnected to what everybody else in the legislature was thinking.

The sharpest symbol didn’t need any words; it was the empty seat directly behind Smith, where Wildrose always placed Towle so she was in the camera shot for question period.

With Towle gone, Smith now has only one female colleague in caucus, Calgary’s Heather Forsyth. And Forsyth isn’t running in the next election.

Smith said with quiet bitterness that some MLAs — like Rob Anderson and Forsyth — cross the floor on principle, not in a quest for power.

She was alluding to their 2010 decision to leave the Tory government and join fledgling Wildrose.

Smith didn’t quite say Donovan and Towle are after power, but that’s what she meant. It’s a charge they’ll have to live with. At the very least, they’ll face angry people in their riding associations.

There are eerie parallels with those earlier crossings.

The defection of Anderson and Forsyth four years ago began the long Wildrose climb that nearly won the party the 2012 election, and kept it ahead of the PCs in the polls, until recently.

Those defections were widely heralded as the beginning of the end for the Tories. Now, the Wildrose jumpers appear to be first off the new sinking ship, Wildrose itself.

The death certificate for the PCs proved inaccurate. Maybe the second will too. But it is harder to see ultimate success for an opposition party so riven with discontent.

Donovan and Towle both say they approached the government. It was so secret apparently, that Towle didn’t even realize Donovan might be joining her until Sunday.

It also took a phone call from a Herald reporter to tell the Wildrose party president, David Yager, that two MLAs had just quit.

That was just one more proof that Prentice’s operation is so airtight they could be building a pipeline in there and we’d never know.

Prentice is now one step closer to a key goal. He wants to reunite Alberta’s conservative movement, just as the federal conservatives did years ago.

It may be starting to happen without meetings, amalgamations or trumpets sounding.

In Alberta, conservative opponents just fade away, either back into the PC fold or into kooky irrelevance: Social Credit, Western Canada Concept, the Confederation of Regions — and now, maybe, Wildrose.

That’s pretty much the view of triumphant PCs. As one MLA said, asking not to be named, “The Wildrose mission was to get Stelmach and Redford. With them gone and an actual conservative leading us, it falls apart.”

If true, that would be unfortunate. Whatever happens to the hobbled leader and her clan, she made Wildrose a spectacularly effective opposition. Alberta certainly needs that.

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